Adventures from Home: Batons, Balls and Bugs, pt. 3

A long, long time ago, when Alfred was still a Schultz and we hadn’t yet left the safe bubble of St. Francis, a little girl picked up a flyer at a parade.  “Leslynettes Baton Twirling Corps.”  Alfred was delighted – she already had a friend from school in the corps - and it wasn’t long before she was marching down the street in a little blue leotard with red sequined sailor collar and small sequined anchor on her hip.

Twenty years and more costumes than you can count later, that little twirler still knows her parade routines.  So do her sisters, who also eventually joined the corps, although never becoming close to as good as she was.  Fishtails with two batons simultaneously, only Alfred.  Regular double and occasional triple toss-turn-arounds, only Alfred.  Crying in the corner in her hula skirt, a very cute little munchkinhead.  Almost hitting the judge with her baton, yeah, that’d be me.

But for us, not being good at something has never been a reason to not have fun doing it.  So when we found those old baton cases in the back hall closet this summer, we were more thrilled to pull out our old metal rods and do a few tosses.

“No, I think that was routine 4, routine 2 had something like this.”  We tried to sort out which routines we could remember.  “Well 3 is certainly the easiest,” one of us piped up, followed by all three of us in unison, “Up, up. Down, down. Out 2-3-4, out 2-3-4. Up. Out. Shoulder 2-3-4 and down.”  “And 6, we all know 6.”  It turned out we remembered a good number of them.  Of the 6 main routines, we knew 1, 3, 4 and 6.  So we had a little parade around the front lawn.

Always feeling more graceful than we looked, we took over the dirveway doing thumbflips, tour jetes, toss-turn-arounds and leaps.  Then we decided to have some real fun, a strut off!  With some more of our favorite routine at the end.  Daddy sat on the porch with his iced tea, laughing as we outlined an invisible square with our high steps.

Mommy’s not-so-little twirlers

 

Munchkinhead clearly won the strut off.